Today's businesses rely heavily on IT operations. Situations impacting businesses must be resolved quickly and reliably. Improper handling of IT problem situations could result in costly outages, impact the availability of a critical business application, or create non-compliance with operational standard requirements. An outage could impact one small component of the entire IT infrastructure with little or no impact to the business, or could span the entire infrastructure and have significant impact on the business. Business Continuity and Recovery Plans must be in place to recover from nominal to critical outages like environmental disasters, sabotages, viruses, hardware failure, etc. These plans document actions, responsibilities, and people to detect and classify such outages, and to coordinate the recovery in the best possible way.
Currently, these plans are typically plain documents, potentially unstructured and not integrated in the overall IT recovery process. However, having the right information available at the right time for the current situation is crucial to make the right decision in a timely fashion. Because a wrong or late decision in an emergency situation can have a huge impact to the safety of people and the business, enterprises must follow a pre-defined and pre-tested coordinated path of investigations, decisions, potential approvals, and recovery actions. The data as part of a recovery plan must not only be available at that time, but integrated in the flow of activities so the critical people can adapt as the situation evolves.
As a further complexity, IT service continuity workflows are typically not supported or automated by process engines. This implies that distributed sources of data and information exist. Furthermore, the information captured while proceeding through the steps of this workflow is often not stored at a single place nor is electronically usable.
Today, a large problem with the processing of workflows to address IT outages is that they either provide predefined/static sequences of work or a fully adhoc/dynamic execution of work. These two approaches are mutually exclusive. Therefore, existing solutions either provide a well-structured and testable but static workflow execution, or instead provide a workflow with great flexibility for dynamic changes but without the option of fully testing the solutions. What is needed in the art is a workflow model providing the advantages of these two approaches.